XPath data types / JAXP / Xalan

[Felix Engelhardt]

Hi there,

I'm having a problem compiling an XSL-stylesheet using JAXP/Xalan which is
really driving me nuts...

When I try to compile a stylesheet that contains something like:

<xsl:value-of select="encode-for-uri(/bla)"/>

then I get a TransformerConfigurationException saying that there was an
error while checking the type of the expression "funcall(encode-for-uri
....)". I don't know the exact error message, as the message I get is in
German for some reason (literally it says "Fehler beim Überprüfen des Typs
des Ausdrucks").

I suppose that the reason for this is that encode-for-uri() returns an
xs:string and @select expects a node-set, and it cannot convert between the
two. Or it is having a problem with the xs:string type in general, since it
does not say something like "cannot cast xs:string to whatever".

If anybody knows how to solve this problem, please let me know, as I've
already spent a few hours on this and I'm really frustrated ;-).

Regards,

Felix

[Joseph Kesselman]

Well, the German message translates as "Error when examining the type of
the expression" ... less than completely helpful. <sigh/>

I believe encode-for-uri() isn't defined until XSLT 2.0; since Xalan's
still a 1.0 processor it doesn't provide this function.

I think your available answers are to either make an external function
call to your own implementation of this function, or to implement
equivalent behavior as a named template, or to count on the fact that if
you tell the system to output HTML it will ensure that HTML attributes
which are URI references get encoded as such.

--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden

[Felix Engelhardt]

> I believe encode-for-uri() isn't defined until XSLT 2.0; since Xalan's

still a 1.0 processor it doesn't provide this function.

Thanks a lot for your hint, it was quite helpful in finding the following
solution:

The problem was that Xalan does not support XSLT 2.0 nor XPath 2.0 (though
it seems to support some of the 2.0 features and does not complain about the
stylesheet being declared as 2.0). So I just switched to Saxon. In order to
tell JAXP to use Saxon instead of Xalan for transformation, I just had to
insert the following line into my initialization code (and include the Saxon
libraries in my classpath, of course):

System.setProperty("javax.xml.transform.Transforme rFactory",
"net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl");

Surprisingly, it was pretty hard to find this information on the web... The
Saxon documentation states that normally this shouldn't be necessary, but
obviously it was for my web app on Tomcat.

Best regards,

Felix